Outlook Who cares about the Co-op selling its farms and pharmacies? We all should. The unravelling of the co-operative movement, and the thousands of redundancies associated with it, is a miserable indictment of the blinkered lust for growth that infected so many areas of commerce from the banking industry in the past decade.

The Co-op was founded in the 1800s by those trying to make life less of a matter of chance for ordinary people – from the quality and price of their food to their ability to save for hard times. What obscene risks their 21st century descendants took with that legacy.